A Visitor (Further World)
by Ella Diver Sophis
Summary: I receive a midnight visitor who takes me away.. Narnia/His Dark Materials/Tolkein cross-over.


I woke suddenly, not sitting up, yet still my eyes opened with a lightning flick and I saw what had woken me. A young woman sat in my bedroom corner, wtaching me, her long brown hair cloaking her shoulders.  
I have never been squeamish, never screamed at spiders or hid my eyes from a news-flash. But that was one thing I feared: a presence of a person unlike me; stronger than me. I feared the Tall Woman in Black, the intruder who would stare back at me in absolute, inpenetrable silence as I entered a room. So now I lay perfectly still, replying to the woman by watching her back. Ilay like ice in the bed, desperate to turn on the light and for her shadow to disappear..   
I reached out behind my head for the lamp.   
Even in the light, she remained. She rose to her feet, and I started to shiver uncontrollably.   
"Please," I croaked, but then she stopped, two feet from my bed. She spread her palms, and her eyes looked down, almost in submission. She wore a long rose dress, velvet, a gold rope slung about her hips and intricate gold loops and chains and rings that threaded over every finger, and across her throat and decolletage. Her face was thin, her hand long and her eyes were bright hazel. She burnt through the air, like white gold, and bare toes protruded from under the hem of her skirt.  
"Who are you?" I said, very quietly, so as not to wake my parents. I wondered if this was a phantom or a mentally disturbed burgular in medieval brocade..  
"I am Andulaith," she replied, her voice calm and harmonious, and quite low. She had an almost Gaelic, French.. Brittany-esque accent? I couldn't place it. "They tell me," she continued, and I pulled myself up a little, "you can see us."  
"See who?.."   
"My people."  
I was confused.  
"I've never seen anyone like you. I don't recognise you."  
She paused, searching for the words.  
"You.. See us. Believe us true. You have faith we could be. Where could I be from?"  
(Tempted as I was to serve up a witty comeback..)  
"I don't know." She looked slightly pained. "I truly don't. Brittany?"  
She shook her head sadly.  
"Elsewhere," she said.  
I frowned, and thought for a moment.  
"A book," I said slowly.   
"As you are," she added, "in stories, mythology, folklore."  
"You're mythological."  
"Yes," she replied excitedly.  
"From.. Another place.. Like earth."  
"We think it might be your place."  
"This?" I was excited by the possibilities. "Here?"  
"Well," she frowned, "not both. This, yes, but not exactly this; and here, yes, but not exactly here."  
"I don't understand."  
She looked at me, pausing before explaining.  
  
"We are like you, a world full of Men, and creatures with concious actions like Men: elves, dwarves, gods, Animagus.. You have stories for children of vampires, witches, wizards, evles, fae, goblins and pixies.. Yet you have strayed, and these things have become visions induced by what you smoke or swallow; dreams; symbols of things past; stories that could not be true, for your closest relative is an animal."  
I smiled quietly,  
"We have turned to science, to that which we can know by logical process."  
She did not smile back.  
"Science and myth will live together, neither stronger than the other but both true, both precious, yet both potent enough to stir a heart against another, and to close a mind's eye."  
I nodded reluctantly.   
"And in my world, too, we have forgotten the outsiders. We have allowed stories to be written, and not thought through. Old men dream of Men that once were brothers.. Now, those not of our own are forgotten. Even those existing together in the same world will not trust another."  
"I know," I whispered, "I understand all this!"  
"So you see us!"  
She looked so happy, so full and so complete that I hated the betrayal of my eyes, revealing that I did not see Them.  
"I see you," I said ruefully, full of guilt.  
She nodded and smiled half-heartedly.  
"Some of us," she continued, "some.."  
I nodded her on.  
"Some of us found the doors and gates and windows that once we travelled through without thought. They were to you, and to others. Sometimes they were to places without a soul, some to places with creatures, some to places with Men-likes without souls or hearts. They were Darklands.. Few other worlds found the gates. Yours did, and stories were told."  
I smiled and remembered fondly the works of CS Lewis, Tolkein, a thousand more than believed in a screen. I told Andulaith so.  
"A screen," she said excitedly, going over the word. "I have never heard it so before. But yes, a veil seperates us now: curtains instead of doors."  
  
The she offered one hand to me, stretching it out like the bravest creature I saw.  
"Will you come to my places?"  
I was afraid of accepting, and denying. I stretched out my shaky fingers.  
"I will enter your cities."  
She took my fingers in hers, and no flash of light greeted me, no stars or darkness. She touched my fingertips, and took me from the bed. Then we stepped tothe window, and she pulled back the curtains. Outside, it was still night. I could make out trees.  
"What are you doing?" I asked.  
She appeared not to have heard, and I cursed myself for pushing myself towards the world of a midnight stranger. She opened my window to the brisk open air, then clambered onto the roof in a very unlady-like fashion.  
"Here," she said impatiently.  
I took her hand and followed her, feeling very under-dressed. What was I doing on a roof with an elf? She said it herself, she was fresh out of a Brothers Grimm.  
"Where is the window?" I whispered loudly.  
She looked at me strangely. It was ten I felt the tiles under my feet were not tiles but turf. The trees swayed and soughed in the warm breeze, and stars burned brighter in the sky. I felt dizzy; once feeling high up, not I was walking on grass. Now before Andulaith, I saw a house like a large cottage. No lights were on, and barely a breath of smoke came from above it.  
  
"This is your house?," I said.  
She turned and nodded through the gloom, her eyes moony and bright.   
"All are sleeping," she whispered after a moment.  
We walked past hissing rushes and felt gorse and silken petals and waxy leaves brush against my bare legs.  
She opened the front door, and guided me into a room downstairs, where, in the darkness still, she showed me to a four-poster bed with thick, cold covers.  
"Sleep now," she whispered into my ear, "and tomorrow, I will show you a place you all must see."  
I cannot remember anymore: that was the last thing to twist my mind further before it fell into peace. The room finally grew dark and my eyes were closed before I could consider the window, the house, this visitor. 


End file.
